How past and future connect in the NYC psychic business

by Rafaela Sinderski

Like every big city, New York is obsessed with the future. And like every big city, it turned its obsession into a prolific business. A quick search on Yelp for psychics in NYC returns 24 pages of experts in giving life advice and hints about what is yet to come. The reviews platform has more than 200 registered professionals in different parts of the city, with assorted price ranges and adjectives linked to their names—from “spiritual leader” to “old scammer.”

But while many new yorkers search for life-changing answers in tarot cards and hand lines, the stories connected to these mystical workers remain unveiled. This project used Yelp API to collect information about 5-star-rated psychic readers in New York City—names, addresses, and business descriptions—to find out the narratives they use to stand out and explain the origins of their so-called gifts.

To learn more about the methodology, access the project’s repository on GitHub.

There are 29 5-star psychic readers with full NYC addresses on Yelp. Most of them are distributed between downtown and midtown, close to the richest and most touristy neighborhoods in the city.

79.3% of psychics are women, using the pronouns she/her in their "About the business" description. Men make up just 13.8% of 5-star professionals on Yelp. Not all pages had information about gender.

Of all the top-rated psychics, 51.7% had some information about their heritage and/or the origin of their gifts as part of the business description.

In a competitive environment, having the gift of storytelling is key to a successful business. Among promises of truthfulness and accurate readings, more than half of the psychics used the platform to tell the public how they acquired their talents. The narrative was attached to gender: only women credited their gifts to family heritages shared by generations. Their supernatural abilities are mostly inherited or innate—something they were born with but is disconnected from their family trees. On the other hand, a third of men who shared about the origin of their power on Yelp said it is tied to life-changing experiences, such as sudden spiritual connections or the death of loved ones.

All the stories about the source of spirituality and clairvoyance are possibly rooted in social perceptions and gender roles, as women were historically associated with the part of caretakers and healers, endowed with sensitiveness and intuition. Over the centuries, these traits served both to confine them to the domestic space, with the excuse that it was their natural place, and to condemn them as sorceresses, witches, or any other characters that did not fit the norms established by the patriarchy.

I can read your mind and I know what you're looking for... It's the data for this project, right? They're available on my GitHub repository.